Saturday, October 08, 2016

7 reasons why teachers believe, wrongly, in ‘Learning Styles’

Now I don’t want to do another piece on the evidence that
learning styles do NOT exist but I do want to expose the reasons for their
widespread belief. Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of
teachers, trainers and lecturers believe in learning styles. Despite decades of
research showing that the theories are bogus, the belief persists. It is so
ubiquitous that it’s hard to attend an educational conference without hearing the
phrase being repeatedly parroted. Seasoned campaigners shake their heads in
disbelief every time they hear the term but it is so deep-rooted it seems to be
impossible to shift. This is a real conundrum.

1. Villain is
intuition

One could argue that these professions are in a
pre-Copernican state, believing that the sun moves around the earth. Their only
appeal is the same as the pre-Copernicans - look the sun moves across the sky,
it feels right to me. Another analogy would be flat-earthers – everywhere they
look they see that the land is flat, so the entire planet must be flat. There
is always a villain and in this case it is intuition.
In both cases ‘intuition’ trumps reality, where limited personal intuition fools the mind.

2. Category mistake

Puzzlingly, even when the evidence is presented, that the
truth is the opposite of what one thinks, it is ignored. I get this. It feels
as though learners are different. They are. But the non sequitur is to think
that they should learn differently. The differences are in ‘personality’, which
are real. These are then translated into the fiction of learning styles. It is
a category mistake. There are many complex issues at play here but the simple
fact that people differ in terms of well–researchedpersonality traits, is mistaken for ‘learning
styles’. There is one complication here, in that some learners have
conditions that can inhibit and distort learning; learning difficulties,
disabilities, dyslexia, autism and so on. But these should not be
confused with generalised learning styles.

3. Simple models

Learning styles is a set of theories. Coffield found 71 of
them, surely a sign that something is amiss? But the appeal of some of the more
common theories seems to come down to two things. First, they are represented as
researched, evidenced and science, when they are not. Second, they are simple
models, such as VAK or Honey and Mumford’s 4 categories, which are simplistic, easy to learn, easy to put on a training PoewerPoint slide and all too easy to explain. The danger here is that their categories are treated as
fixed entities with no statistical distribution or overlap. The data gathering
to decide what style a person has is also woeful. This promotes a lack of
critical thinking.

4.
Anti-intellectualism

Other forces are also at work here. Teaching, as practised
by teachers, trainers and lecturers, is not, like ‘medicine’ or ‘engineering’ -
evidence or even research-based. In fact, the research is treated with great suspicion.
Many who teach, especially in higher education, in research institutions where
they should know better, have no real knowledge of what good teaching entails
or how people learn. The defence you often hear is that teaching is a
‘practice’ and not the application of theory, evidence-based or otherwise. The
problem with this defence, is that it simple begs the question ‘What practice?’
We still need some way to distinguish good from bad practice. This
anti-intellectualism allows those who teach to literally do what they want even
down to believing and applying false and damaging theories.

5. Professional
bodies

Professional bodies are also to blame, having blindly
regurgitated old theory in courses (which they sell), for decades. One really
does have to ask what teacher training has been up to for all these years, when
their student-teachers come out as flat-earthers? Why don’t they come out and
say what needs to be said? For many years professional bodies, such as the CIPD and ASTD, who
survive on running courses, promoted these practices. In practice, they tended to reinforce these faddish theories,
as they made money from them, and it was left to researchers and bloggers to do the hard work. To be fair some have moved on, especially the CIPD.

6. Poor CPD

Few read much in the field and CPD is scarce and often faddish.
Courses often contain the standard memes such as Maslow and Learning Styles, as
there is no real intellectual rigour in their design. Those that pass for
experts have actually cobbled together their courses from previous courses.
Paschler is right in identifying a vast industry of conferences, workshops,
courses, books and CPD around learning styles, that perpetuate the myths.

7. Groupthink

Lastly, we have groupthink. People hear the terms so often
that they believe them to be true. They become memes in a community,
uncritically used and deeply embedded in a culture, a culture prone to taking
things at face value. Questioning these sacred cows becomes an act of betrayal.
Teachers feel good in themselves because they feel as though they are treating
learners as unique individuals, when what they are actually doing is the very
opposite – stereotyping and destroying learning.

Stereotyping

Finally, and this is the killer argument for me, even if
learning styles were true, stereotyping learners is dangerous, if not
counterproductive. Let’s suppose I do have a disposition towards not ‘reading’.
This could be because I come from a background (like me) where there is no
culture of reading, a household that has no books. This disposition should not
be used to focus on visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learning. What a good
teacher should do is teach that child to read, perhaps put even more effort
into that practice. The learners that lose out here are the poor and
disadvantaged who are stereotyped into low achieving channels. It is easy to
feel as though learners are different (they are) but to categorise them as VAK,
or some equally as vakous schema, is
a big mistake. At the University of Illinois, they found that students who had been fed the myth of Learning Styles at school, were held back by this at University. It was regularly quoted by students as a reason for their poor grades, used as an excuse for failure.

Conclusion

For me, this is a touchstone issue. The fact that it has
persisted for so long is a damning indictment on our professions, practices and
professional bodies. Learning styles do not exist - let me repeat – learning
styles do not exist. To believe in learning styles is to believe that the sun
goes round the earth or that the earth is flat. It’s an intuition gone bad – a
fail. Worse still, is to apply this theory in practice. If you categorise
children as VAK or adults to Honey and Mumford or any of the other dozens of
learning styles theories, and yes there are dozens, you’re doing learners a
disservice. You may even be ruining their education.

Evidence

We have 35 years of evidence against learning styles. This
includes individual studies, systematic reviews and books. People like Pedro de
Bruyckere, Wil Thalheimer and I have been talking about this for decades. Chapter 1 of Pedro de Bruyckere’s book ‘Urban Myths’ is an
excellent summary of the research. A critique of Fleming’s VAK can be found
here and a critique of Honey and Mumford’s theory can be found here.

To get specific for a moment. Kratzig and Arbuthnott’s took learning styles as identified
using self-report and a questionnaire. Less than 50% of the participants
identified the same learning style using both assessments, raising serious questions
about their validity. 40% of participants self-identified as visual learners,
and 60% were identified as visual learners through the questionnaire, but only
23% performed best on the visual test. The percentages were 16% and 8% for
kinesthetic, yet 52% performed best with the tactile test. This research show
no significant correlation between learning style and objective memory
performance.

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Learning styles persist because for many (boring, new, accidental) trainers/teachers they open the door to consideration of how learners might engage with learning. The questions that learning styles sprung from (albeit a spring way too far) are good questions. I think that a useful discussion of learning styles would have to consider why we haven't come up with with an alternative, positively transformative option. I'd be interested to hear if you've seen one.

The problem with the engagement argument is that it makes trainers/teachers engage in the worng way. To stereotype learners, is, as I argue, a destructive, not constructive act. On alternatives, we have in cognitive science, strongly evidences theories on how people learn and great candidates, that are largely ignored. Effortful learning, learn by doing, formative assessment, deliberate practice and spaced practice. Few teachers and trainers know even the rudiments of emmory theory. That's like bridge builders not knowing and physics.

This is a great set of "whys" but please be careful yourself of the generalisations about what ITE are doing with "learning styles". I am not aware of any systematic research into what ITE institutions are teaching but as more and more training moves into schools (in England) there is more of a danger of this being passed on in the classrooms rather than the lecture halls. I know from my own practice that whilst we talk about learning we do not talk about learning styles in a simplistic way and certainly not in a simple categorisation way such as VAK. You quote Coffield above and as you say there are many, many ways of defining learning.

I agree that moving training out to hopless INSET days will be a disaster. But I don't buy the idea that teacher training does not tot learning styles. there are umpteen links to Universities that promote Learning Stles as part of good practice in teaching. The real issue Paul is whether the courses deal with hte actual research. I feel they don't. new teachers come out believeing this stuff - it comes from somewhere. I remember giving a talk to a room packed with fresh young teachers at ResearchEd, who were genuinely shocked to hear about this research. They had no idea. I'm sure there are pools of good rpactice but generally? I'm not so sure. I suppose I base my evidence on the widespread and deep belief in their existence and efficacy among young teachers.